When I first began my career in disability advocacy as a professional, I was bright-eyed, believing that I would be working with the most vocal supporters of DEI and who rallied behind diversity as an answer to the first Trump Administration. When I was invited to go lobbying on the Hill for disability policies, I was so sure I would be meeting with the brightest minds of the Democratic Party—I even told my boss as such. What she said I will never forget, and has proven true in the years since; a dynamic made evident throughout the pandemic, a “return to normal” and the ineptitude that led to a second Trump administration: “the people you think will show up, aren’t always the ones that do.”
At the time, I read this as a bipartisan way to manage my expectations, given we were required to lobby both sides of the aisle for disability rights. After all, no one is exempt from becoming disabled. When I actually went on the hill, I experienced my first reality check. While Republican representatives met with us in person, we were met with aides and assistants of Democrats on disability. Meetings would end after a polite 10-15 minutes with a tight nod and a thank you from our policy advisor for hearing us. This has always been the trend. In fact, Bob Casey is one of the few Democrats I’ve met with in person, as well as Ayanna Pressley, who showed a vested interest in disability rights.
I would have thought they learned their lesson about the importance of disability when Republicans tried to use the ADA to close polling stations in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the 2018 Gubernatorial election of Stacey Abrams. After all, data released in 2017 by disability orgs showed the vast majority of polling places were inaccessible to disabled people, so accessibility could be weaponized at any time. Stacey Abrams even created coalitions to include disabled people in electoral conversations as a result, but alas, those networks were all but forgotten once Biden was elected.
Biden was elected with massive support from the disability community—he campaigned on “saving us” from Covid and restoring the services that had been lost because of it. Only a few months in and Fauci was saying the same things under Biden that he had under Trump: “The disabled and elderly will fall by the wayside.” This was not a call to hunker down and protect the vulnerable, it was permission to return to normal and let the already dead just die. Disabled people were called self-absorbed liars for sounding the alarm.
And again, disabled people were called “insane” and “crazy” for telling people that as Democrats voted to end COVID-era protections and subsidies would send people into financial ruin and would be a win for the alt-right, only for exactly that to happen.
So, no, Democrats plunging healthcare negotiations into the pits of hell based on the pinky promises of republicans is not a surprise, it is a known factor for disabled people, particularly when you consider that healthcare and disability are trillion-dollar industries in which their donor class is leveraged to the hilt.
Self-described capitalists have no interest in protecting the profit centers of the billionaire class that sees bodies and minds as cash money. Throughout the entire time, Democrats, like all others in the political class, have put little to no guardrails on private equity buying up disability services, hospital systems, nursing homes, and institutions. Quiet as it’s kept, these are the entities who prematurely pressed for a return to normal is resulting in an 8-10% disablement rate (some estimates even higher) from COVID. Quite the ROI. When you’re disabled, you make them money that only someone else can extract as you are legislated into poverty just to maintain access to healthcare.
There is a reason why DEI was reluctant to include disability, it’s because disability is the “left’s” way of maintaining the same belief system as republicans regarding every other letter in the abbreviation.
It’s racist to say that Black and Indigenous people shouldn’t have children, given the histories of the two racial groups, but you can say that disabled people shouldn’t have children and never get much pushback. After all, no one is going to care that the two groups white supremacy has tried to eradicate also have the two highest rates of disability.
You can get Eric Adams and Gavin Newsome, who many democrats uphold as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, to lobby the public to expand forced institutionalization of disabled people and for those people to only become concerned when Republicans like RFK jr want to put political dissidents and trans people in those same facilities.
You can preach feminism up and down but never increase the income limits for services and state healthcare leaving many vulnerable, often women, to rely on their partners having control of all financial assets so they qualify resulting in higher domestic violence rates for disabled women.
Democrats, self-described capitalists, will never fully invest in the disability community, healthcare overall, because they wouldn’t be able to bullshit as effectively. They cannot merely pay lip service to disabled people because we are confronted with their ineffectiveness the moment we get out of bed in the morning. They could not merely scream Black Lives Matter and then provide them with more funding, they would have to move to defund and abolish because there is no reason for 30-50% of people killed by police be disabled people. They couldn’t give up on Roe v Wade, because it would require they not give up on accessibility to abortion facilities not just for abled-bodied people, but for disabled people as well. They wouldn’t lean heavily into the institutionalization of disabled people only to be shocked they’ve prepared beds for you too.
Democrats will never fully support disabled people because disability is the antithesis of capitalism. It requires we take a step back from always making a profit when it comes to the lives of people who can produce no profit outside of extraction from our for-profit healthcare system. It means building accessibility and a culture of interdependence and civic engagement for those whose accessibility only seems to matter for during elections.
I wish I believed in the Democratic Party but when their failures result in the deaths and disablement of the people you care about, even when they’re in power, it’s a tough ask. The Democratic Party blinking on protecting the healthcare of the most vulnerable may be a surprise to everyone else, but the dead bodies disabled people have been surrounded by tell a completely different story.
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